The Railway (23 page)

As always when he recognised every word, Zangi-Bobo slipped into blissful sleep...

Musayev-Slogans, however, was unable to sleep at all. He was lying close by, beneath the spreading vine; at first he simply felt bored gazing up at the meaningless stars in the spaces between the vine's dusty foliage and the bunches of ripe grapes – and no less bored listening to the strange squeals, howls and crackling that filled the night-time ether. The ex-policeman felt heavy and wasted at heart, as if some slow-acting force had deprived him even of the slogans that were his last refuge. The Uighur came to the end of the slogan-free song that had lulled Zangi-Bobo into sleep. Zangi-Bobo's snores were followed by silence, then by signals in which Musayev discovered a strange property: their pipping and peeping was precisely synchronised with the twinkling of the stars in the vine's dusty spaces. One by one, however, the stars would drop down, clustering into yellow, mouth-watering bunches only just above his head.

Something achingly sweet filled the breast of the ex-sergeant, as if he at last understood the meaning of everything. Rising soundlessly and without putting on his down-at-heel boots, he began to walk slowly towards the barn.

On his way there, he stirred up the sheep, which were sleepily chewing the cud; leaning against their fence, he began to piss. Hearing the stream of his urine, the sheep too began to make some kind of rustling sound. Musayev smiled and continued on his way. There was no light in the barn. As he groped for a switch, Musayev found some matches beside a five-branched candlestick. Half closing the squeaking door, he struck one and used it to light three of the candles. In their flickering light he saw the thirty-five books, standing in a long row on the shelves for drying apricots. He moved quickly towards them, but the candles started falling out of their holders, and, after picking up two that had gone out, he burnt himself on a third and threw the candlestick onto the straw floor so he could clean off the wax that had stuck to his burnt skin.

A moment later he went up to the books. After standing there for a while, Musayev struck another match and opened the first book that caught his eye. The flame lit up the top left-hand corner of the page, and he caught sight of the word:
samar
. This blood-red word was followed by five explanations. He greedily read three of them (1 – fruit; 2 – result; 3 – harvest), but by then the match had burnt down to his fingers. He tossed it into the darkness and struck another match. This lit up another word, either
semiz
(fat) or
semorg
(a mythical bird rather like a phoenix), but he moved the match straight back to the first corner; once again, however, as he was searching for the last two meanings of
samar
, the match burnt his fingers.

The third time he was holding the match in the right place and so he quickly grasped the word's last two meanings, but they were followed by a sentence where all he could make out was the word
yerga
. Musayev lit yet another match, but his fingers were trembling so much that it just flared and went out immediately. His heart had almost stopped beating. He felt he knew this sentence already; his fingers – and time itself – were moving more slowly than his heart and his thoughts. At last he lit another match and feverishly read the words: “
samari yerga urdi
” – “his fruit fell on the earth.”

Something inside him really did seem to break off and fall – fulfilled or perhaps full of failure – to the ground. In the smoke-bitter darkness of the barn he struck match after match; one new word after another floated up to him, but he was unable to take them in.

That same signal from the stars or the ether was knocking at his heart and beating against his bare, burning feet. “
Samari yerga urdi
…
samari yerga urdi
…” What all this meant he could not have explained, although there was a moment when something lit up inside him – not a slogan, but the plywood arch over the entrance to the collective farm, whose name, “The Fruits of Lenin's Path,” had somehow never been entered into the dictionary – but this was only a momentary illumination, a flash of lightning, a last fragile ark of memories, and then there was another tear, or drop of wax, or match head, falling onto the earth, beneath his burning feet… “
Samari yerga urdi
…
samari yerga urdi
…” He himself was now burning on the straw, along with these half-open books whose pages were now being turned not by hands but by fire, and he could see words rising from these books in the shape of flames and their ashy shadow was falling back down beneath his burning bare feet. “
Samari yerga urdi
,” he whispered for the last time – and these words were the last words to burn in him, their dazzling sweep was the last thing he sensed. Musayev died three days later in the Kok-Terek hospital; Zangi-Bobo had come to the end of his life a day before him, having outlived his own mind. The two men were buried for some reason by Huvron-Barber, although he was not related to either of them. Zangi-Bobo's relatives did not dare to attend the funeral, since the fire that began that night in his barn had spread to the house of Soli-Stores, the eldest son of Chinali and chief heir to his vast wealth.

That night, banknotes accumulated by Chinali and his son burnt in great sackfuls. Thrown up into the air by the flames, the notes and their ashes fell into neighbours' yards, onto patches of wasteland, into the Salty Canal and into the hands of onlookers. Stinking water from the canal was poured over Khiva carpets while arms of flame stretched along lengths of gold-embroidered cloth from Bukhara; slates – enough slates to cover the whole of Gilas – were continually cracking and exploding, scaring away the volunteers with their buckets of water; the volunteers themselves were struck not so much by the extent of the fire as by the extent of the wealth left untouched. Soli-Stores was able, just with the money he happened to have in his pyjama pocket, to buy a Pobeda car from the Korean Filip Ligay and send him off to the City in it to bribe the fire service to come.

A caravan of fire engines arrived towards six in the morning, after which they remained registered in Gilas forever. They arrived just as the porcelain was catching fire, after the timber had finished burning and molten glass had poured like water into the Salty Canal. Soli's wife had just sold seven hundred rolls of satin at knock-down prices; needing somewhere to store what was still undamaged, she used the money to buy half of a house on the opposite side of the road.

The firemen worked fast, and water pumped from the Salty Canal soon formed a pond bounded by Soli's robust outer walls; sticking up out of the pond were burnt rafters and a metal TV aerial pointing towards Moscow. The firemen also dragged two badly burnt men from the adjacent buildings. As the reader knows, these were the former Sergeant-Major Kara-Musayev the Younger and Zangi-Bobo, who had clung on dementedly to a two-button wireless, tearing the plug out of the wall along with the socket and surrounding plaster.

Soli-Stores abandoned the gutted house and built himself a vast new house, inadvertently sending the price of building materials sky-high and then feeling he had no choice but to keep the prices of the materials he sold retail to others at the same high level. The fire thus continued to afflict Gilas for many years and the swimming pool created in the grounds of the old house was only a partial compensation. Most of the children would just flounder about in it for a few minutes before washing themselves clean in the now glassy-clear Salty Canal. Only the very bravest would take a deep breath and dive down beneath the remains of girders and beams, bobbing back up to the surface with silver Russian teaspoons, translucent Chinese porcelain cups or even a wad of sodden counterfeit banknotes... But not everyone was brave enough – and anyway, what the children found most often were one-inch nails and splinters of slate.

“What about Uchmah?” you will probably ask. Uchmah became pregnant. And only she knew by whom. No one else had any idea who had thrust this child on her: whether it was Huvron-Barber – in revenge for the deaths of Kara-Musayev and Zangi-Bobo; Yusuf-Cobbler – out of gratitude; the spirit of that inveterate womaniser Kara-Musayev; or just some passer-by. All she ever said, when the subject of her baby came up, was “Shafik! Shafik!” – which was how she pronounced the name “Shapik,” the name of the first boy in her matrilinear clan.

Shapik grew, as people say, not by the day but by the hour, but somehow he grew into a thin and gangling idiot who used to scratch his bottom and then suck his dirty index finger. On his seventh birthday, when he looked seventeen yet had the mind of a baby of seven months, Oppok-Lovely gave him both the uniform and the civilian clothes of Sub-Lieutenant Osman-Anon, who had mysteriously disappeared. What Shapik liked most were the khaki breeches and the black
kitel
with blue shoulder-straps, and he used to wander along the railway line in them, resembling a giant crow and never failing to terrify both Akmolin, who had spent time in the camps in the days of Kaganovich, and Nabi-Onearm, who seldom let a day pass without stealing cotton seeds.

Soon after his eighth birthday deep wrinkles appeared on his face and he began to speak – if what Shapik did with words can be called speech. Once a word had formed on his tongue, it was as if it were glued there, unable to slip, or slide, or leap off it again. And so, as if he had the hiccups, he would go around whispering, shouting or just plain speaking this poor importunate word, until after anything between four and ten days it would disappear of itself and for ever, sometimes yielding to a long and tense silence, sometimes giving birth to another word that would prove equally stubborn and hard to evict.

At the age of ten he looked like a withered-up old man, even though at night he still slept in a communal bed between his grandmother and his great-grandmother, whom he cuddled up against like a baby barely weaned from the breast. And they accepted him as a baby – until the night when, lying between Aisha and Saniya with his left hand on Aisha's right breast and his right hand on Saniya's left breast, he drenched them with a copious fountain of semen. The howls of the two elder widows woke the youngest widow, who promptly took her son away to sleep in her own bed. But there is no need for the reader to feel anxiety – nothing happened to the grandmother or the great-grandmother, neither of them gave birth to any strange beast, and everything returned to normal except that they each kept secretly looking at Uchmah, wondering in silence if she would soon bear the fruits of incest. But they waited in vain. Shapik did not become his own son and his own father in one person any more than he became his own grandfather, great-grandfather, grandson or great-grandson.

By the age of eleven, however, Shapik had come to look exactly like the late Hoomer, the patriarch of Gilas. And Oppok-Lovely, who had just set up a commission for the preservation of Hoomer's heritage, decided to take Shapik away from his family, saying she needed him as a model for the writer's portrait – although what she really wanted was to intimidate the now excessive number of chroniclers in Gilas: the alcoholic Mefody-Jurisprudence, whom she had already appointed to her commission, Nakhshon the town's human rights activist, who had quite lost her head after the death of her husband, and all those wretched folk storytellers trying to earn twenty-five roubles a page. If any of these chroniclers overstepped the mark, she would release her poor, witless boy from confinement and ensure that they caught sight of “the spirit of the late Hoomer” roaming about the garden. Shapik would, inevitably, be making the most of the few pleasures he had been granted by life. He would scratch his behind and suck his index finger; he would keep stammering one and the same word (usually a fragment of some obscenity – the only protest his feeble soul could manage); or he would spray his seed over the roses and dahlias. All this, linked to the image of the already mythical Hoomer, made Oppok-Lovely's visitors feel as if doomsday had dawned.

And only Oppok-Lovely's scribe, the little boy supplied to her by the No. 11 October School, knew the truth; being the same age as Shapik, and having already been entrusted with the task of recording Hoomer's heritage, he had also been allocated the daily tasks of reading to the young cretin from the writings of the old seer and playing the odd game of nuts with him.

Uchmah, meanwhile, wanted to revenge herself on the woman who had taken her child. For days on end she sat in her empty yard beneath a naked and no less orphaned sun, baking her brains as if to cook up some act of vengeance. Finally she realised what she should do. During the night of the next full moon she transferred all her powers of prophecy to the son of Mukum-Hunchback, a boy known as Bakay-Croc who only a year before had lost both his legs; he had been about to steal a wheelchair from a goods wagon in the middle of the night when the train began to move… The morning after this full moon Bakay-Croc uttered his first prophecies; Uchmah, for her part, ceased to be a witch and never menstruated again in her life.

Bakay-Croc declared that he had seen in a vision that the future belonged to the legless and crippled; whoever lost a leg, he affirmed, would stride into eternity. He was like a motionless monument, like a speaking statue, and he soon acquired a multitude of followers. They gathered at night in the scrubland beside the Salty Canal, wrapped themselves in white cotton sheets and began rolling about until one of them let out a howl as he or she smashed a limb or dislocated a joint and so broke through to enlightenment. Next came a wave of fanatics who, also wrapped in sheets, chose to lie down like their prophet in the paths of oncoming trains. It was this that led to Akmolin's retirement, after forty-five years in charge of his diesel shunter with no interruption apart from his five years in the camps as a young man. Rif the Tatar, meanwhile, made large sums of money helping Father Ioann at the Russian cemetery, burying unattached legs, irrespective of faith or size, in return for appropriate bribes.